noahlt

FWIW, the vast majority of YC founders I've met have told me "It was good when I did it, but I don't know if I'd do it today. The batches are so big!"

I chalk it up to a pretty typical nostalgia. Everybody is biased towards thinking the experiences of their youth were perfect, and any change is detrimental.

If this team member is as key as you say, your relationship with them is probably just as important to the future of your career as anything they might be able to do on your current team.

Related: US average marathon times have fallen in the past 20ish years, as more people run marathons.

It's a good thing.

Incidentally, this is why UNIX uses zero for "success" and nonzero for errors.

Empirically, this seems not to have happened with my account.

I’ve heard that early versions of the Dropbox client allowed engineers to remotely open a Python shell on users’ computers, for debugging purposes.

My favorite is to read Plato as a set of advertisements for the Academy. "Come to the Academy," they say, "and partake in conversations like this!"

(This is why Phaedrus ends with Socrates arguing that you cannot learn anything by reading, only through discussion with a teacher.)

Unfortunately, you've been beaten to the punch by Ian Betteridge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

You have to account for the fact that before modern filtration civilizations developed other ways to make water safe to drink, like brewing beer and boiling water for tea.

The authors of SICP draw a distinction between declarative knowledge (facts about the world) and procedural knowledge (instructions for how to do things). Programming, they say, is a way to precisely communicate procedural knowledge.

Most interpersonal communication is both imprecise and not procedural knowledge, and that is the biggest difference between speaking with a person and programming a computer.

It's not.

This is dated Dec 15—I'm surprised that I haven't heard of this before today.

Fortunately, the election's just around the corner, and if you'd like to help solve these problems, you can do so with your ballot.

http://www.sfyimby.org/endorsements-nov-2016 Is a good pro-housing voter guide for San Franciscans.

Right, but that money might be better spent other ways—for instance, by selling them twice as many tickets, in the hopes of retaining more audience members, some of whom may one day become high-rolling donors.

The fact that arbitrage is happening is obviously bad for the Opera, but I want to point out that every opera ticket is sold at a loss. Selling opera tickets just at break-even would drive down attendance significantly (and it's already low).

Opera companies run like VCs: most of the audience/startups are losses, but a few of them are donors/unicorns who keep the opera/VC afloat.

At every company, for any given candidate, there exists a set of interviewers who will always fail you for an interview. There is no company with >1000 employees at which you could interview with a 100% success rate.

I think you will really appreciate this blog post http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goog... by Steve Yegge about getting a job at Google.

Keep in mind that Einstein still went to grad school for physics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Kleiner

"In computer terms, Smalltalk is a recursion on the notion of computer itself. Instead of dividing "computer stuff" into things each less strong than the whole—like data structures, procedures, and functions which are the usual paraphernalia of programming languages—each Smalltalk object is a recursion on the entire possibilities of the computer. Thus its semantics are a bit like having thousands and thousands of computers all hooked together by a very fast network."

That's Alan Kay in The Early History of Smalltalk, which you might enjoy reading in full: http://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/

A friend of mine feels that the H1-B system is rigged, that the big companies will get as many H1-Bs as they ask for and that smaller companies essentially don't have the same degree of access to that labor pool. My impression is that he is wrong, but I'm no expert. As someone who deals with this regularly, what's your take—do you think big companies are practically guaranteed to get H1-B workers? How disadvantaged are smaller companies (esp those without access to YC resources)?

The author, qntm, recently posted a follow-up article entitled "To Destroy the Earth", which looks at the problem from a different perspective: https://qntm.org/destro

I think it was written to be accessible to a very broad audience.

> Of course free money is better than no free money! That's all this will prove and few will debate that. The real questions are: 1) is it worth the cost, and 2) is it better than alternatives?

I think the majority of dissent in the United States would actually argue that free money is worse than no free money. (If this surprises you, you may also have been surprised that Trump is going to be the GOP nominee.)

Plato had additional metaphysical beliefs, such as that "reality" consists of ideas, and is not spatiotemporal.

The way you say this makes it sounds like you have examples of times when evolutionary arguments have been used in the past. I'd love to hear some examples.

What about Flow?

Noah from Kite here. We're prototyping various keyboard shortcut schemes; we're excited to ship whatever we settle on.

The wording of "doubled in Q1" is quite misleading. It actually doubled between Q1 2015 and Q1 2016. You could say that it doubled in the past year.

Comparing entire-home AirBnB rentals to hotel room costs seems like an unfair comparison. Renting out an entire home on AirBnB seems much more akin to getting a hotel suite, which is more expensive than a single room.

Go's package manager, `go get`, also downloads from GitHub. I don't know the details of how `go get` and CocoaPods work, but I would be interested in learning why one is unscalable and the other seems to work.

I agree. If "Write your music scores online" is not enough for you to understand the product, then you are probably not a target user.

Similarly, lots of ad tech and dev tools landing pages are unintelligible to people who probably don't want to use the product, but perfectly reasonable to those who might.